They're playing our song - but I wish they wouldn't

If it has been conclusively proved over the years that football is a funny old game, then its sub-section devoted to songs must be ranked downright peculiar. One can easily imagine historians in a thousand years or so understanding the concept of sport readily enough, only to puzzle over terrace culture. A stadium full of grown men singing "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles"? What's that all about?

When Liverpool agreed to play the Z-Cars theme in tribute to Rhys Jones they could hardly have made a more powerful statement. The shock value was almost off the scale, on a par with taking to the field in blue or signing Gary Neville, yet this particular 'anthem' is an old Liverpudlian playground song with no words. (There are words, but Fritz Spiegl's distinctive version is all tune.) And even then Liverpool couldn't bring themselves to run out to it, as Everton do, but played it immediately before 'You'll Never Walk Alone'.

If that suggests the music a team runs out to is somehow sacred, spare a thought for Paul Simpson, the Preston North End manager, who is blaming his team's dire home form this season on Elvis Presley and UB40. More specifically, he is keen to jettison 'Can't Help Falling In Love' being played as the teams emerge, because he believes the immortal line: 'Wise men say, only fools rush in' is killing all the Deepdale enthusiasm before a ball is kicked. 'That song has got to go,' Simpson said after Preston were booed off following a 3-0 defeat by Colchester last Saturday week. 'You need a buzz when the players come running out. We have to get the place rocking.'

That seems reasonable enough, though one cannot help wondering how Oldham Athletic climbed all the way into what was still Division One in 1991 by running out to 'Mouldy Old Dough'. Readers too young to remember Lieutenant Pigeon's bizarrely successful 1972 number one are congratulated and advised that any effort to track it down to check it out can only end in disappointment. Just before the Premiership arrived, Oldham changed their tune to the grander but still homely 'Fanfare for the Common Man', in time for Eric Cantona to make his English league debut as a substitute for Leeds United at Boundary Park in February 1992, yet Latics fans in exile still have 'Mouldy Old Dough' as their ringtone of choice.

If anyone can recall a team running out to a less obviously inspiring piece of music it would be interesting to hear of it, though at least Oldham never made the mistake of overexciting their fans or tuning pre-kick-off expectations to an unrealistic pitch. Several clubs have managed that, most notably Sunderland a few years ago when in addition to the eclectic mix of Dance of the Knights from Romeo and Juliet and 'Ready To Go' by Republica they were in the habit of firing up giant flamethrowers on the pitch just to make sure no one had nodded off. When the match actually started, it was inevitably to a palpable sense of anticlimax.

Talking of anticlimax, what sounds like an obvious choice to accompany teams taking the field - the Entrance of the Gladiators march by Julius Fucik - is actually a booby trap. For generations it was the fanfare Wigan rugby league teams ran out to at Central Park, only to discover to their visible discomfort halfway down the pitch that after the strident opening bars the tune dissolves into the sort of music more normally associated with circus clowns. Wigan were never more relieved than when the tradition was quietly dropped on moving to the JJB stadium, and never more exasperated than when their new owner, the ever-progressive Dave Whelan, demanded its reinstatement.

Funny how adopted tunes can haunt you like that. Everton are actually a case in point. It is not quite right to say they run out to 'Johnny Todd', it is the drums and blaring organ notes of the electronic Zeddies theme that makes it so stirring. Paul Simpson could only approve, and Watford already run out to the same tune, yet as smug Liverpool supporters have been queuing up to point out in recent weeks, Z-Cars was not set in Liverpool but in Kirkby, thinly disguised as a fictional Newtown. So there is something apt about Everton moving out there, even if most supporters are deeply suspicious about surrendering the city to Liverpool.

Pedants who argue the new site is only four miles from Goodison, and list clubs such as Bolton and Derby who have moved almost as far to relocate on the ring road, are missing the point. Everton's case is particularly poignant. They were in Liverpool first. The second club in the city ended up with the ground, the name and the success, and soon it will have Liverpool to itself. Whatever politicians and geographers might say, a visit to Kirkby is not a visit to Liverpool. If a song is central to a club's identity, how much more so is their home, when their history revolves around being half of the oldest - and arguably the most entertaining - double act in English football?

Bill Kenwright, the Everton chairman, claims the club have no choice and that fans have voted for the move. He is not Mr Popular on Merseyside at the moment. Fans feel the club must have been mismanaged if they really have no option but to leave Goodison's faded grandeur for a groundshare with Tesco, and the lack of alternative options was one explanation for a whopping 10,000 abstentions in Kenwright's poll of 36,000 supporters. Another 10,000 voted against, while 15,000 said yes. That is a mandate of sorts, but as one fan put it, the choice was couched as Kirkby or oblivion. And still only 40 per cent voted for Kirkby. They have probably seen Blood Brothers, one of Kenwright's hit musicals, where people who are rehoused in Skelmersdale find their problems follow them out of the city. They can certainly identify with the showstopping song 'Tell Me It's Not True'.

Deadline departure of Pearce's Folan idol

So no Ronaldinho or Daniel Alves for Chelski then, no Dimitar Berbatov for Manchester United and no Reebok escape tunnel for Nicolas Anelka.

All quite routine on the last day of the transfer window really, except for Hull paying a club-record £1m for Wigan's Caleb Folan (right). Who he? A nail in Stuart Pearce's coffin at Manchester City, that's who. Folan was the raw young recruit Wigan picked up for £500,000 from Chesterfield in January, who promptly secured them a vital three points by scoring the only goal of the game at Eastlands in March.

Pearce was embarrassed because his own more expensive striking options were in the middle of their five-month home league goal drought, and he had scouted Folan - who also scored against City when Chesterfield knocked them out of the Carling Cup - before deciding he was not a Premier League player. Paul Jewell's managerial stock rose, Pearce's slumped, Wigan ended up staying up on goal difference. Barely six months later both managers are out of the Premier League. And now, so is Folan.

Platini's final view ignores how distance lends disenchantment

Michel Platini's heart seems to be in the right place. One instinctively supports his initiative to increase the number of actual champions in the Champions League from nine to 16, even if the big leagues don't like it and the plan to award qualification to FA Cup winners seems half-baked.

Now the Uefa president wants Champions League finals to be shifted from Wednesdays to Saturday nights. Sunday newspapers can only applaud that idea, however curious the rationale. Apparently Platini was disappointed in Athens in May to see so few children in the stadium and believes a switch to weekends would make it easier for families to attend.

And so it might, as long as Uefa can make the tickets available, though one cannot help feeling that bedtimes and days off school are not really what has been preventing European Cup finals becoming more family-friendly. Not when set against the inconvenience and cost of travelling to places such as Istanbul, Athens and, this season, Moscow.

And really, Platini has a bit of a nerve pretending Champions League ties are suitable places for children at all when so much of last season's publicity involved Manchester United supporters being biffed over the head by the Roman police. Uefa should sort that little problem out first, before pretending the Champions League final can be some sort of rival to EuroDisney. As United have just been drawn against Roma again, the advice from last season is repeated: turn up in crash helmets. Even toy ones would make marvellous guerilla theatre.